ATL Dev Creates Gesture Language for Wearables

Gesturish is an intuitive gesture language for touch devices created by a local developer and startup co-founder. You should be able to learn Gesturish in a matter of minutes – just in time for the impending Apple Watch craze. Simply swipe or tap the pattern of each letter, number, or punctuation. Here’s the Gesturish alphabet:

Jared Malan, co-founder of We&CO, partner at Standard Code, and front-end web dev instructor at General Assembly, came up with Gesturish on a run. He was “listening passively to a podcast. The host said something about a way to make communication more accessible—I don’t really remember. I wasn’t paying attention so I came up with my own, more accessible, communication method—a Morse code like solution for our increasingly small devices.”

This was well over a year ago, but the idea stuck with him. “I get kind of excited when I think about being able to understand a message through touch. I think it’s reasonable to believe that we will be able to communicate through haptic or ‘taptic’ touch in the future,” he adds.

With that in mind, Jared started learning Morse code while driving around in his car. “Morse code is pretty cool, but it has a steep learning curve. With just two input signals, timing becomes critical, but the speed of the signals are the biggest challenge a new user of Morse code faces. I thought of a solution that doesn’t require precise timing” he explains.

Gestures—swiping and tapping—has become a skill everyone has these days, even young kids. With only 5 different input signals (swipe in all directions and tap), a user can spell words, use numbers, and add punctuation with only a few gestures. It works by the user making between one and three gestures to write a letter. She then swipes left to move the letter into the sentence and begins the next letter, number, or punctuation.

He’s working on an Apple Watch and iPhone app scheduled to launch early summer. We’ll keep you posted with project updates.